President Barack Obama made a clear commitment to metro area residents hurt by Hurricane Isaac when he visited LaPlace after the storm. The president said his administration would be "expediting some of the decisions that may need to be made to ensure that we've got the infrastructure in place to protect people's property and to protect people's lives."

President Barack Obama.Associated Press archive

But faster decisions on flood protection work would have very limited impact without money to actually build levees and other structures. That was made clear at a congressional hearing in Gretna on Tuesday, and the administration and Congress need to work together to beef up the Corps of Engineers' construction budget.

The corps' annual budget for construction nationwide is $1.6 billion, a figure that could be fully spent on Louisiana's most pressing needs alone. U.S. Sens. Mary Landrieu and David Vitter and U.S. Rep. Cedric Richmond called the corps' current budget woefully insufficient. They're right.

"From where I sit, it really looks like your budget is a disaster ready to happen," Sen. Landrieu told Maj. Gen. John Peabody, commander of the corps' Mississippi Valley Division.

After federal levees and floodwalls failed during Hurricane Katrina, Congress authorized billions of dollars to improve flood protection around much of the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain. That upgrade, completed last year, was credited with preventing flooding in St. Bernard, New Orleans and some parts of Plaquemines Parish during Hurricane Isaac.

But many areas outside those federal levees were devastated. In LaPlace alone, about 7,000 homes flooded. In Plaquemines Parish, President Billy Nungesser said the area south of the Phoenix community was spared because of a federal levee that stopped storm surge from Breton Sound. North of Phoenix, however, it was another story, with the surge overtopping a local 8-foot-high levee and causing Braithwaite and other local communities to flood.

In some of these areas, especially in St. John the Baptist Parish, surge protection levees were first proposed more than 40 years ago, and studies have gone on for years. Sen. Vitter said it was "more than frustrating" that communities for which protection was proposed long ago remain vulnerable to tidal surges during storms. It is, indeed.

As St. John Parish President Natalie Robottom said during the hearing, "Hurricane Isaac was the ultimate study, and it failed." Now it's time for the corps and the federal government to work toward building some of those structures. In Plaquemines, for example, Congress authorized 17 contracts to improve non-federal levees, but only recently the corps awarded the first of those.

Money, in most cases, remains the main obstacle. But Hurricane Isaac showed that storms won't wait, and that's why the corps' insufficient budget for flood control work is disheartening.